


Be Near When I Call Your Name

by th_esaurus



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: AU, Gen, Gender or Sex Swap, Misgendering, Misogyny, Stream of Consciousness, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-17
Updated: 2014-05-17
Packaged: 2018-01-25 12:18:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1648376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What happens to the Winter Soldier if James Barnes is born a girl?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Be Near When I Call Your Name

There is dirt under the fingernails of her right hand. She knows how old the soil is, how many organisms nestle among the ground rock, how much of that dirt is air hiding between atoms, a numerical ratio.

She does not know how she got dirty.

Her left hand is clean. It has no fingernails. It is metal.

*

 _The girl on the bridge_ , she asks. _Who was she?_

Moments before this, she breaks a man's collarbone because he is within arm's reach. Closer than her training allows most men near her.

Alexander Pierce is allowed, and he kneels down, holds her gaze while the wailing body is dragged out of the room. A few metres away - she could give the distance in feet and inches if it were asked of her - a man named Brock Rumlow folds his arms and watches her. These are all actions that she can see but cannot quantify. She does not know if Alexander Pierce is touching her softly on the knee because he wants to calm her, or because she looks like his dead daughter. She does not know if Brock Rumlow crosses his arms because it is cold in the vault, or because his clenched fists give too much away.

 _The girl on the bridge_ , she says.

 _I knew her?_ She asks.

She leans back in the chair, and Rumlow looks away.

*

There are men to reset her cracked bones. Men to stitch her wounds. Men to inject her with long-winded medicines and to force pills dry down her throat with a curved plastic tube. Men and men and men. They call her the Asset and when they do not, they refer to her as _he_.

Why would they assume anything else?

She is always masked. She has breasts that are bound loosely under her uniform. She does not menstruate. She had her hair cropped short once, but it has been allowed to grow in neglect. The length of the Asset's hair does not affect the tension with which she twists garroting wire around her palms.

Brock Rumlow hands her a paper cup filled with water, to help her swallow the pills.

 _He's not a fucking animal_ , he mutters.

*

 _If you were a boy_ , Brock Rumlow says to her, because he has seen her face, _I wouldn't have given two shits about you._

*

Alexander Pierce, because he has seen her face, tells her the story of his dead daughter.

Part of a diplomatic delegation in Bogotá, she and her colleagues were captured by militants, held in a basement, treated like cattle and collateral. They were not people, merely bargaining chips. All of the childhood photos Pierce took with his daughter, all the bedtime stories, all the gifts she had wanted and he had denied - substitutes to soften the blow; she could not have a kitten but she could have the bicycle, she could not trick or treat but she could thread ribbons in her hair and dance on her father's feet to vinyl records in the living room - they did not add up to a person. Only a ransom.

Pierce was a negotiator. _Do you know that word?_ He asks.

 _Dictionary definition,_ she affirms.

_Recite it to me._

_Noun, negotiator, one who arranges for or brings about by discussion and settlement of terms,_ she says, in Russian. He seems unbothered. He carries on the story of his dead daughter.

He was a negotiator, not a military man, though he knew military men. These men almost saw his daughter as a person; saw her as enough of a political tool that she should not be sacrificed for other men's greater good. This was not good enough for Pierce. He would negotiate.

There is not enough compromise in the world for everyone to clutch their ration.

The diplomatic delegation were shot point blank, mainly from the front or side. They flew Pierce's dead daughter back onto US soil to be buried, once the military men had had their way.

_You don't remember a word of this, do you?_ He asks. He sounds amused. How do people sound amused? She could recognise it but not imitate it.

 _No sir,_ she responds.

_How many times have I told you this story before?_

_None, sir._

He laughs very softly, and touches her knee.

*

Who was she? The girl on the bridge?

Brock Rumlow grinds his teeth together, and folds his arms, and looks at her, and looks away. She leans back in the chair and he leaves the vault.

*

She wears a ponytail and a mask and she trains with the strike team. She is smaller by one quarter of an inch than the least of them. Her breasts are bound for convenience and her sleeves cut short. Her flesh arm has the same weight in muscle and bone as the metal stand-in at her left side. She trains with the strike team and they are allowed knives and loaded guns. She is allowed her programming.

Brock Rumlow pulls her off a man she has killed. He is not dead yet, but he will be. She calculates the trajectory and rate of his bloodloss, and she knows he will die. Rumlow is taller than her by two inches and pulls her up by the waist, throws her down and grabs the scruff of her neck, drags her into the debriefing room. There are men on the other side of the mirror, three closed circuit cameras, and a recording device. There is a man dying in the training hall.

He yanks down her mask so she can breathe freely, and puts his hands on her shoulders.

 _You hurt?_ He asks.

 _No sir,_ she responds.

_You gonna hurt me?_

_No sir._

_You wanna?_

_No sir._

_Okay. You fucked my boy up real good back there._

_He will die._

_He might._

_He will die._

Rumlow pulls her mask back over her jaw and nose. He puts his hands back on her shoulders. He doesn't quite touch the metal of her left arm, his palm just over the thick cloth of her shapeless t-shirt.

*

She is aware of the phrase _Put him on ice._

She is aware of the phrase _Wipe him, and start over._

*

Alexander Pierce tells her she will receive her assignments at his house. She will be given the address, and a time, and she must be punctual, and she must unholster her weapons.

It is cool on the rooftops of Washington DC at night. Her left arm feels the chill but cannot bristle to trap her warmth. She could name four common and seven uncommon constellations if she looked up, but there's no necessity for it. New York City, she knows, is on average 4 degrees colder at this time of year, but she does not know what time of year it is.

Why New York City?

She is punctual; early. She watches the housekeeper for seventeen minutes. Then she looks up at those constellations. Then she unlatches the en suite bathroom window and pads through Alexander Pierce's bedroom. He has a photograph of himself and his absent wife and his dead daughter, high up on a bookshelf where it is hard to notice unless looked for. He has four potential exit routes in his bedroom.

She has not been told where to wait, and stands at the end of the queen bed. She places her guns in a row on the mattress.

Pierce is neither early nor punctual, and this is deliberate.

*

There is a joke. She does not know the function of the joke. There is a joke in the strike team that Rumlow is soft for her.

 _He'd do anything you wanted,_ Rollins muses aloud.

 _I know the programming,_ Brock Rumlow spits.

There is a joke in the strike team that Rumlow is soft for her and she would do anything he wanted with her mouth. The function of the joke is unclear.

*

The girl on the bridge was always a woman, but girl seemed somehow more appropriate.

*

She has dirt under her fingernails and there is a body on the rough shore of the Potomac and the atoms in the dirt were once part of a cosmic miasma that became the wiring of her arm and the bricks that built New York and the keratin in the blond hair of the body on the shore.

*

_How many times have I told you this story before?_

_Four times, sir._

_\--Wipe him, and start over._


End file.
